Page 231 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer 211
who had led these men, tasting his first whiskey, feeling the
pressure of his hardon in his jeans, seeing the crucified cowboy
hanging on the railroad cross, helpless and drunk and howling
at the full Wyoming moon low on the horizon behind him.
— Third-person omniscient point-of-view, scene from
novel, I Am Curious (Leather), written 1968, published 1972, and
then partially published as a “Drummer novel” in Son of Drum-
mer, 1978; serialized in whole under the title, Leather Blues, in
MAN2MAN Quarterly, 1980-81; published as the novel, Leather
Blues by Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Press, 1984.

Actually, critic John F. Karr, in the Bay Area Reporter, wrote, June
27, 1985, that beginning in 1972 with the first publication of my novella
Leather Blues through my creating Drummer culture’s heart, image, and
style as Drummer’s founding San Francisco editor-in-chief: “Jack Frit-
scher is the man who invented the South-of-Market prose style (as well as
its magazines which would never be the same without him).”
In the 1970s hardly anyone was writing, photographing, drawing
erotica because they were all fucking. In the right place at the right time,
I had twenty years of magazine and journalism experience in writing and
photography, as well as ten years in leather and S&M, when I became
editor of Drummer. Supply and demand. A nasty job, but somebody had
to do it.
It was the dawn of gay culture. The times cast me as the hot boy edi-
tor . . . and, luckily, like “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the crowd called out for
more. To put content, ethos, and style in those pages with everyone else
out fucking and dancing, I had to fill that magazine cover to cover out of
my own dick and brain inventing the first articles on cigars, tits, daddies,
all the hot tickets that have become the usual “themes.”
At one time in 1979, I had edited half the Drummer issues in exis-
tence.
In truth, I wrote two-year’s worth of Drummer, a dozen issues (Drum-
mer 19 through Drummer 33) — the thickest, juiciest, most original issues
Drummer ever had — mostly at the baths, with pencil on yellow legal pads
in small rooms painted black under a naked red light bulb.
Arriving at 8 PM, hard with anticipation of how the Barracks/the
Slot/the Everard/the St. Mark’s/wherever, would pick up by midnight, I
mainlined (metaphor only) the anticipation of the action into the veins of
my stories, feature articles, and interviews. I channeled the high energy
of the sexual revolution at the baths into my erotic art (which is the other
side of my “legit” literary writing).

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK